List of Illustrations
Prologue
Taking Birds Seriously
A Humanistic Turn
An Ornithologist for Intersectionality
1. Performance All the Way Down
Material Feminisms
A Performative Continuum
What Is the Role of Metaphor in Biology?
What Is at Stake?
The Stakes for Evolutionary Biology
Mind the Gap
Why Queer Biology?
Where Are We Going?
2. Critical Concepts
What Are Male and Female?
Historical Ontology
Sex Is a History
Sex Difference versus Sexual Difference
Sex and Race
Sexual Development and Differentiation
The Sexual Phenotype
Sex Determination and Sex Reversal
Discourse
Agency
Queer and Queering
3. Gender Performativity
What Is Performativity?
Elements of Performativity
Performativity and Trans Experience
Between Butler and Barad
4. The Enactment of the Biological Self
Genes and Development
What Is Molecular Discourse?
Want to Go to the Movies on Friday?
How Discourse Becomes Genetic Action within Cells
The Choreography of Gene Expression
The Performative Phenotypic Landscape
Canonical versus Performative Pathways
How Does the Body Regulate Growth over Space?
What Is the Role of Physical Forces in Development?
Performativity of Cellular Discourse
Are Genes Causes?
Agency in Developmental Biology
Citationality and Homology
Posthuman Power
Physiology and Immunity
Neurobiology and Psychology
Sexual Selection
What Is Not Performative in Biology?
Why Performative Biology Now?
5. How Do Our Sexual Bodies Develop?
The Role of Chromosomes
On Gene Nomenclature
How Do Gonads Differentiate?
Reproductive Tract Development
Genital Development
Post-embryonic Sexual Development
Sexual Development Summary
6. Variations in Our Sexual Development
Terminology and the Framing of Embodied Sexual Variation
Moving beyond Pathology
Chromosomal Contributions to Differences in Sexual Development
Genetic Variations in Gonad Development
X Chromosome Inactivation
Genital and Reproductive Tract Development
Noncoding Genetic Variation
How Does the Environment Affect Sexual Development?
Queer Science
7. How Evolution Generates Sexual Variability
The Evolution of Sex
Evolutionary Variability of Sexual Development Initiation
Why Sexual Differentiation Mechanisms Are Generatively Queering
Sexually Disruptive Selection
Evolution of the Molecular Discourse of Sexual Development
Evolution of Sexual Transition
Evolution Is Incompatible with Sexual Essences
Norms and Innovation
Placental Performativity
Limits of the Binary Bottleneck
8. The Future of Performative Biology
Performative Scientific Hypotheses
Performativity of Illness and Disability
Recalibrating Causality
Biology Is Ready to Think Performatively
Pluralism and the Phenotype
What Is Evolutionary Biology About?
9. Performance All the Way Up
Sexual Reproduction Is an Intra-action
A Posthuman Genealogy of Performative Discourse
Is There Gender in Nature?
“What Is Sex?” Revisited
Toward a Scientific/Cultural Concept of Gender/Sex
Performative Perspectives on Transsexual Experience
Sex and Race as Scientific Apparatuses
Sex and Race Categories in Biomedical Research
Post-disciplinary Material Feminisms
An Intellectually Queer Space in Science
Acknowledgments
Appendixes
Appendix 1. Material Feminisms
Appendix 2. Acquired Immunity
Appendix 3. Current Models of the Genotype-Phenotype Relationship
Appendix 4. Modularity
Appendix 5. Genetic Assimilation
Appendix 6. Why Gene-Level Selection Is Insufficient
Appendix 7. Internal Selection
Notes
Bibliography
Index